Stavanger, Norway
Oxidation worries engineers, but I have always found it to be incredibly beautiful, as it decorates expanses of metal, rendering age and exposure visible. Cécile Anda works with rust as an artistic process, as much as she works with more typical and controllable materials, like metal or paper that can be cut or wood that can be painted. Her silhouettes range from the natural to the human, landscape to leaf to feather, filled not with realistic detail but abstract designs, some determined wholly by her, others by organic methods. “Plume,” a feather-shaped mobile made from thin wood painted on both sides, works with nature indirectly, its all-over patterns recalling animal prints and botanical studies. “Amo” is more direct, a mobile contoured like a pair of intertwined people, two heads and one body, nearly heart-shaped, sliced from sheet metal and ornamented only with delicate orangey spots of rust, as if the artist trusted nature to collaborate on the sculpture with her. The effect is romantic in both senses of the word, as an emotional and aesthetic responsiveness to nature, and as a certain type of love.
—Lori Waxman, March 17, 12:05 PM